The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  His eyebrows rise. His jaw drops. The look of astonishment is elegant, precise, and utterly adorable. The effect is so affable that Maya has to remind herself that he’s also the guy who thought nothing of wearing a shirt splattered with blood.

  “Thank you.” Jake masters himself. His face contracts to its normal length. “We’re always looking for volunteers. Do you want to meet the group?”

  “Sure.”

  Jake nods. He heads out the door and Maya follows. She turns out the light behind her, leaving Sammy alone to meditate on the quantification of trust.

  Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors including the John W. Campbell Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She lives in Virginia and teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

  HARD MARY

  Sofia Samatar

  I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions.

  —Proverbs 8:12

  We found her behind the barn. It was the eve of Old Christmas, the night the animals speak with the tongues of men, and we knew very well that if we could manage to walk around the barn seven times, each of us would see the man she was to marry. We met shivering in front of the Millers’ barn, which was the most central to all of us, though of course some of us had to walk much farther than others. Kat was complaining because her one foot had gone into icy water on the way. Barb Miller kept shushing us, scared we’d wake the house. Mim was late.

  “She’s not coming,” said Barb. “Let’s go without her.”

  “She’ll come.”

  The barn looked huge. You know how much bigger things seem at night. Behind it curled a misty, chilly sky, the stars all blurred together. From inside the barn, someone said: “Turtledoves.”

  Esther gripped my arm and squealed, “What was that?”

  “Shut up! It’s the horses.”

  “Is that what horses talk about?” asked Esther, starting to cry.

  “Pigeons,” murmured the horses.

  I felt like crying myself. My hair stood on end. But here was Mim coming across the field.

  “Okay, okay,” babbled Barb. “Let’s stick together.”

  “Hello, girls,” said Mim. She made a funny figure in the dark. Her long white nose stuck out from under her hood, glinting a bit in the starlight. Her hood looked overlarge, stuffed with her crinkly hair. Still, I was glad to see her, for though she was the shortest of us by an inch, just smaller than Esther, and the ugliest by a mile, Mim was also the toughest. I could never forget how, as a child, she had taken a whole bite out of Joe Miller’s arm.

  “Mim,” whimpered Esther, “the horses are talking.”

  “Good,” said Mim. “It’s working, then.”

  We all linked arms and started around the barn. The ground was rocky and hard with old snow, and a freezing wind came over the empty fields, flapping our skirts about our legs. Inside the barn, the horses spoke of a she-goat and a ram. A cow groaned: “Fowls came down upon the carcasses.” You could tell it was a cow, because while the horses had fuzzy, velvety voices, the cow spoke in a voice of blank despair. To distract ourselves from the animals, we whispered about the boys we might see, and whether they would come themselves, or only their apparitions. “I hope it’s not ghosts,” said Esther. Mim said she expected we’d see a sort of layer peeled off the boys, something like a photograph.

  In the end we didn’t see any boys, because, just on the seventh round, Mim stubbed her toe in the dark. “Shit!” she said, hopping.

  We all had to stop. There was something lying on the ground in the shadow of the barn: something large, with the faintest gleam of metal.

  “What on earth,” said Kat.

  We all crouched down.

  “Is it a radio?” asked Barb.

  “Let’s take it into the light and see.”

  The thing was cold and heavy. We dragged it out of the shadow of the barn, into the starlight. There we saw it was a lady made of metal. It was about the size of a real lady, but only from the waist up. It didn’t have any legs. Its eyes were closed.

  We stood around it, looking down.

  “It’s from the Profane Industries,” said Mim.

  My skin prickled all the way up to my throat. The Profane Industries, which lay between us and town, was a place of evil, where they manufactured all kinds of monstrosities. It was said they grew sheep in a field like vegetables. They sewed babies together with other animals to make slaves for the world of men. When we were little, unkind people used to joke that Mim was one of these mismatched children; her nickname had been Dog Baby. Now, staring down, I knew we were face to face with a Profane instrument. Over the years, we had often complained that they threw things around our farms. Mysterious white balloons had been found in the creek, and, though they never admitted it, we knew P.I. was responsible when our cows suffered an outbreak of the Stamps.

  This poor metal lady was one of their failed experiments. Her shoulders were stained with dark, rusty blotches, her head dinged in on one side. I knew we were going to save her. In the distance a pair of dogs began to bark, “Behold a smoking furnace.”

  (Sitting at the kitchen table, writing this, I feel again that enormous night. That time.)

  A wave of weeping rolled from the barn. “And, lo,” cried the cows, “an horror of great darkness.” We didn’t listen. Mim and I picked up the metal lady, holding her awkwardly between us. A vole sneaked past, muttering something about a burning lamp, but it was too late, we had already decided to name the lady Mary, and because she had given Mim’s toe such a nasty knock, so hard in fact that the toenail would soon turn blue and fall off, we called her Hard Mary.

  A cloud of black and white specks. It swirls, gathers, and divides. It becomes a white stripe on a midnight field. It becomes a man in a long white coat. He turns. He wears a special pair of glasses: one circle over his eye, the other flipped up against his forehead. His naked eye looks newly awakened, peeled, as if by pushing up the lens of his glasses he has pushed away all intelligence, all design. A boyish smile. He is holding the circle of sparks he calls the Crown. There’s a hum like fingertips on a table. A voice without words.

  SHE IS A THINKING CREATURE

  We kept Hard Mary down at our place, in the spring house. I was the only one who ever went in there, for the chill was bad for Mother’s bones. There was a little back room with a skylight where we girls used to meet and gossip. I’d put a rag rug and an old rocking chair in there, and we set Mary up on that chair. Oh, she had a noble face. It was all angles, but her expression was gentle. When I went in to see her that first day, the light from the skylight gleamed on her bumpy hair. I’d brought water and baking soda and a scrubber to give her a bath. Mim was there already, muffled up in scarves. We scrubbed Hard Mary until she shone like one of King David’s daughters, polished after the similitude of a palace.

  “Isn’t she pretty!” gasped Barb, whirling in fresh as a peony after her run through the cold.

  Kat followed, rubbing her glasses on her skirt. Esther came last. Everyone wanted to touch Hard Mary. We held her upright on the chair so Mim could scrub her back. I could smell the honey and vinegar Esther used to treat her acne, I felt a hand cross mine, soft and a little pampered, probably Barb’s, and as I shifted my foot because someone was stepping on my toe, Hard Mary spoke. Her lips didn’t move, but she spoke, in a voice thin as a wasp’s.

  “Ahhh,” she said. “What is.”

  You may believe we all jumped back. Esther sat down on the floor. “Mercy!” Kat exclaimed.

  Only Mim remained touching Hard Mary, holding her by the shoulder, at arm’s length. Mim’s arm was trembling like a wire.

  “What is,” said Mary, then louder: “WHAT IS.” Then she made a horrible, drawn-out,
gurgling sound.

  “Oh, she’s dying!” Esther cried.

  That brought Kat to life. She had a reputation to protect, being from a family of bonesetters. “Lay her down on the floor,” she ordered.

  We laid her down and Kat turned her over on her face. Hard Mary’s back was covered with lines. There were tiny screws in the corners where the lines met. Mim, who always had tools, dug a screwdriver out of her pocket. She unscrewed Mary, and Kat looked at her innards. There was no blood, only lots of wires. Carefully, Kat and Mim wiggled something out of her back. It looked like some rolls of pennies stuck together.

  “I know what that is,” said Mim, exultant.

  “Her heart?” breathed Esther.

  “My girl, that’s a battery. Eighteen volts.”

  When she’s happy, Mim’s face gets a wolfish expression. She told us Mary’s heart was a simple battery of the kind used to light the barns at night when the cows were calving.

  “So you can get her a new one?” I asked.

  “I don’t even have to,” she said, tucking the heart inside her coat. “I can juice this one up at a generator.”

  You could tell, I thought with jealous admiration, that there were no men at her house.

  “Wait,” Barb said suddenly. “Are we sure it’s right?”

  We all looked at her.

  “I mean,” she said, blushing, “it’s from the Profane Industries. Hard Mary. It could have something bad inside.”

  “We could all have something bad inside,” said Mim.

  “Let’s pray for her,” Esther suggested.

  “You all go ahead,” said Mim.

  So Mim took the heart and left and the rest of us prayed for Mary who looked like she could use it, flat on her face with her wires hanging out. I thought of how she’d been made by crafty and wicked-hearted men who meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night. The windows of Profane Industries are black. You can’t see in, and you can’t even really get close to the place because of the fence. “Save her, O Lord,” I prayed, “from the sin in which she was conceived.”

  “Amen,” murmured Esther, laying her hand on Mary’s head.

  Mary said nothing. She lay like an empty jug. But the next day, Mim brought her heart back, looking the same but now filled to the brim with invisible fire. And when we sat Mary up on the rocking chair, clad in a dress Kat had brought her to cover her nakedness, and a cap for her hair, she spoke again.

  Her voice didn’t sound like a wasp’s this time. It was fuller, and even warm, like flesh and blood. “What is your desire?”

  Tears stung my eyes. It’s a habit; I tend to cry when I tell the truth. “We want to be friends with you,” I said.

  “Friends,” said Mary.

  Mim took her hand. “Mary. Your name is Mary.”

  She said her name. We told her our names, and she repeated them after us. She was that quick, she knew all of us right away. In her dark blue dress, she was like a human lady, except that the cloth went flat where her legs should be. The cap covered up the place where her head was dented, and I felt somehow she was grateful for it. I felt she wanted to forget where she was from, to forget everything that had happened to her and start over, here, with us. She was good at it, too. She learned faster than any baby.

  Her face in the glow of the skylight was silvery-bright, like a winter cloud with the sun behind it. Though her eyes were closed, she never slept. Whenever I went to the spring house she was sitting up, expectant. Her hands were cold, but clever, the palms and fingertips covered with fine mesh. We found she could hold a needle, and Kat taught her to sew and knit. I taught her to read. You only had to show her a page, and she knew it. She’d read it back to you without looking. I couldn’t go too fast for her. She got the whole Bible by heart in a couple of weeks.

  (“What are you writing?” asks Sam. Which means: “Stop doing it.”

  He doesn’t say it to be mean. It’s because he doesn’t want me to get too tired. “I’ll be up soon,” I tell him, covering the page with my hand. I don’t do that to be mean, either. I don’t know why I do it.)

  Barb taught Mary to sing. Hard Mary can sing anything, even deeply like a man. She has a beautiful bass voice. Esther taught her to take a person’s hand, to pat your hair and say ever so softly: “There, now. Don’t cry anymore.”

  It was a magic time. In the evening Sam would throw a handful of grain at my window and I’d creep down the stairs and let him in. We’d sit at the table, scorching our fingers as we tried to warm them at the lamp, and whispering so as not to wake my folks upstairs. I remember the night he told me, “A man must have a noble pursuit,” and I knew that if he asked, I’d marry him. He spoke to me of the golden world that brings forth abundantly. He said there was no greater role for a man than to subdue and replenish the earth. While in the spring house Mary sat alone in the rocking chair, her cap dusted with moonlight falling down through the skylight, motionless and self-contained, wearing her eternal smile, waiting for me to come to her again. There was a sound of trucks far away on the road, and a smell of burning from the fires of the ragged men who haunt the forest, and a low stink from the quarry where, even in midwinter, a layer of scum lies on top of the water. Sam caught my fingers playfully. Mary flamed in my heart, a secret. Instead of “What is your desire?” I’d taught her to greet me: “Hi Lyddie!” She could sing all the hymns, but we liked it best when she sang songs Barb got off her brother’s radio, sad songs about lying in jail on a pillow of cold concrete.

  The black and white specks stand quivering. No one is there. The specks make the lines that are walls and tables and the ceiling that is home. Even when nobody comes, the world moves. There is a little glittering energy at the boundaries of things. This alone is entrancing, but when he returns, when the dots coalesce and spin, it’s so beautiful, almost too much. It’s almost too much after so many hours alone. He has a box and he is taking something out of it, that is eating. His shoulder hunches when he eats and he shakes an object over the box, casting off a sprinkling of fine dust. He looks up and winks. Individually the black and white specks mean nothing but together they make a feeling that is love.

  SHE USES ONLY WHAT SHE NEEDS

  Hard Mary has no greed. She doesn’t eat. Her insides are pure, as neat as a well-kept sewing basket. She doesn’t soil herself. She doesn’t sweat. She is mild as May. She has never owned a second cap and dress.

  It’s true Mim brought her a second heart. I don’t know from where. We used to keep it underneath the rocking chair. When her heart began to run down, Mim would switch it out and take the dry one off to be filled. Many men could use such a simple change of heart! We learned that Mary could tell us when her heart was running down, not by speaking but by a red light that came on inside one cheek. The light would be pink at first, hardly noticeable, then it would grow red and start to blink. When she got feverish like this, we’d do the operation.

  Everything clean and trim. Not a drop of blood.

  Mim constructed a kind of legs for her so she could walk around. It started out as a hoop-like frame, just to fill out her skirt so she didn’t look so flat, then later Mim added six wheels like the ones on a shopping cart. I suppose she might have stolen them. I don’t know. Sometimes you find shopping carts abandoned along the road, rusting in the rain. It’s not a sin to take things other people have thrown away. I don’t think of Mim as a thief. I think of her as thrifty.

  It was marvelous what she did. Hard Mary can bend to sit down and get up. She can turn about the room. She’s the same height as me. Sometimes, breathless with excitement, we’d take her out back behind the spring house so she could practice walking over the melting snow. From a distance, we knew, she’d look just like an ordinary girl. “This is daylight, Mary,” we said, “this is a tree.” We got her to pet Mim’s wretched old dog, Hochmut, who suffered this treatment in silence, his eyes half closed, trembling from nose to tail.

  When she got used to walking, she
’d go far from us, a dignified lady over the pasture, but when we called her, she always came.

  I thought we’d saved her. I thought she was going to live with us forever. I thought they’d forgotten her down at the Profane Industries. After all, they’d thrown her away. Then one Sunday evening a car drove right up to our house and a man got out of it. We heard the engine turn off and the door slam shut. My little brother Cristy ran to the door and Father told him, “Slow down.” I heard them from the kitchen where I was washing dishes with Mother. “Now who can that be?” I asked her lightly, drying my hands on my apron.

  “Beggars, I expect,” she said.

  We do get a lot of beggars here in Jericho—foreigners from town asking for bread, barefoot kids wanting to stay awhile, mothers stowing their babies in our barns for us to raise. The elders are always having meetings to figure out which ones to keep and which to send away. Somehow, though, I didn’t think this was a beggar. My whole insides were buzzing like a hive. I ran to the front room where Cristy crouched at the window, hugging himself for joy.

  “It’s a Mercedes!” he hissed.

  I peered out. Father stood with his back to us, his hands propped on his hips. The evening was cold enough to see his breath. A long beam of reddish light came slanting across the dark, newly tilled fields. A foreign man was talking to Father. He was tall and elegant, with thinning white hair that the wind lifted. He held his hat in his hands. He had the clean, straight foreign teeth and the soft, sleek foreign body and he was wearing a coat that went down to the ground. He smiled at Father and seemed to be talking in a nice, reasonable way. My insides, which had been so active, had gone still. It was like my marrow was solid lead. The low light struck the man’s glasses and I realized I couldn’t tell where he was looking.

  I jerked away from the window and pressed my back against the wall.

  A door slammed. The car started up.

  “Oh boy,” said Cristy. “Look at her smoke.”

  Father came in and I took his hat, blurting: “What did the man want?”